The Piracy Years

American Assembly reports on access to knowledge and the digital transition

I’m happy to announce the publication of Shadow Libraries: Access to Knowledge in Global Higher Education (MIT 2018). It is, in many respects, a sequel to 2011’s Media Piracy in Emerging Economies and involves many of the same researchers. It’s also available for free under a CC license. From the intro:

From the top down, Shadow Libraries explores the institutions that shape the provision of [learning] materials, from the formal sector of universities and publishers to the broadly informal ones organized by faculty, copy shops, student unions, and students themselves. It looks at the history of policy battles over access to education in the post–World War II era and at the narrower versions that have played out in relation to research and textbooks, from library policies to book subsidies to, more recently, the several “open” publication models that have emerged in the higher education sector.

From the bottom up, Shadow Libraries explores how, simply, students get the materials they need. It maps the ubiquitous practice of photocopying and what are—in many cases—the more marginal ones of buying books, visiting libraries, and downloading from unauthorized sources. It looks at the informal networks that emerge in many contexts to share materials, from face-to-face student networks to Facebook groups, and at the processes that lead to the consolidation of some of those efforts into more organized archives that circulate offline and sometimes online—the shadow libraries of our title…..

What will future historians will see as the major Russian contribution to early 21st-century Internet culture? It might not be troll farms and other strategies for poisoning public conversation — but rather, the democratization of access to scientific and scholarly knowledge. Over the last decade, Russian academics and activists have built free, remarkably comprehensive online archives of scholarly works. What Napster was to music, the Russian shadow libraries are to knowledge.

Much of the current attention to these libraries focuses on Sci-Hub, a huge online library created by Kazakhstan-based graduate student Aleksandra Elbakyan. Started in 2011, Sci-Hub has made freely available an archive of over 60 million articles, drawn primarily from paywalled databases of major scientific publishers. Its audience is massive and global. In 2017, the service provided nearly 200 million downloads. Because most scholars in high-income countries already have paid access to the major research databases through their university libraries, its main beneficiaries are students and faculty from middle- and low-income countries, who frequently do not.

From the Uruguay coda to Shadow Libraries by Jorge Gemetto and Mariana Fossatti:

We end with a familiar scene. On an October morning in 2013, students arrived at the University of the Republic in Montevideo to find a major police operation underway. In collaboration with Interpol, the organized crime unit had raided fifteen copy shops in the area surrounding the law school and detained thirty-two people (El País 2013a). The timing was provocative. The law school-—the largest unit at the university with more than fourteen thousand enrolled students (Udelar 2013)—was in the middle of exams. News of the raid spread quickly. The arrests and confiscated photocopy machines were televised and the topic trended on social networks, where it met an avalanche of criticism….

Perhaps predictably, then, the academic community reacted strongly to the copy shop closures and arrests. Shortly after the raid, the Federation of University Students (FEUU) published a declaration calling for “free and democratic access” to the full corpus of human knowledge (Montevideo Portal 2013). A few days later, students held a demonstration in front of the law school to protest the closures (El Observador 2013). The Student Center at the law school, in turn, launched a petition to demand better access to course materials and reform of the copyright law, including the creation of educational exceptions and the decriminalization of nonprofit infringement. The campaign collected 10,000 signatures and resulted in the presentation of a draft reform bill to Danilo Astori, then vice president of Uruguay (El País 2013b)…. Continue reading “Pro-tip: Don’t Raid the Law School During Finals”→

From the Shadow Libraries chapter on Brazilian universities by Pedro Mizukami and Jhessica Rheia:

In Brazil, debates about access to educational materials in higher education have been dominated for years by disputes about the legal and moral implications surrounding photocopying. Until 1998, Brazilian copyright law permitted anyone to make full, single copies of protected works for personal, not-for-profit use. This limitation on copyright protection anchored a complex web of curricular and student practices that developed in the course of the 1970s and 1980s as photocopiers came into widespread use. When that permission was withdrawn in the copyright reform act of 1998 (Law 9610/98), publishers tried to recapture that part of the market—first by trying to persuade universities to negotiate licenses and later opting for police raids to break the copy culture on university campuses. For the most part, these efforts failed, leaving university copy culture largely unaffected and creating a stalemate on copyright reform that continues to this day. In the meantime, parts of the photocopying ecosystem have shifted online—though publisher enforcement efforts have undercut the emergence of any large-scale shadow libraries to rival the Russian examples from chapter 1.

While parts of the publishing ecosystem have moved toward open access models (in which Brazil has been a leading international force), undergraduate students’ needs are still mostly served by conventionally licensed content and university life continues to rely heavily on infringement as a means for access. Attempts at collective management have failed, and business models for paid online access have—so far—offered debatable value for universities. As students and institutions move toward digital materials and models of access, Brazil is in a transitional period. Copyright law is clearly broken, but the balance of forces between publishers, universities, and state has not yet been able to consolidate around a new regime. Continue reading “The Copy Shop and the Cloud”→

Shor in the City narrates the intertwined lives of three characters in Mumbai from very different class backgrounds. The film opens with one of them, Tilak, planning to kidnap a prominent author from a party. Unlike traditional kidnappers, Tilak is not after ransom but the electronic files of the author’s latest novel, which he plans to publish and sell. Tilak, it turns out, is a book pirate—and a barely literate one. His method is to strike up conversations with customers at bookstores to find out which books are popular. He then buys these books, copies them, and wholesales them to children who sell them on the streets of Mumbai.

One of the books that Tilak picks up from the bookstore is The Alchemist by the Brazilian author Paulo Coelho. The Alchemist takes on an important role in the film, serving as Tilak’s method of educating himself and as the means through which he and his newly wedded wife get to know each other better. Stumped by many of the words in the book, Tilak begins to read with an English-Hindi dictionary, educating himself while also developing a relationship to the book beyond its value to his trade. Coelho’s The Alchemist is not an accidental choice in the film. The book was widely pirated in India and remains very popular, both in mainstream bookshops as well as among pirate sellers on the street. When Coelho was alerted to the fact that The Alchemist was being sold by teenagers on the streets of India, he said that he was honored that his book was being sold in “the smallest bookstore in the world” (Bazzle 2015)…. Continue reading “Pradeep’s Eleven”→

It’s possible that the hamster reference in the subtitle of Alek Tarkowski and Mirek Filiciak’s chapter on Polish universities takes a little too long to pay off. I accept responsibility. The explanation is that Polish access to educational materials has been divided primarily between a state-supported research, publishing, and library ecosystem and a large, legally-contested P2P service called ‘Chomikuj’ or Hamster. From their chapter:

Chomikuj has walked a complicated line with respect to Polish copyright law. It is a commercial service with a variety of pay models that provide users access to uploaded content—much of which, it is widely understood, is unauthorized content uploaded by users. But the service also complies with notice and takedown requirements in Polish law, removing files targeted by copyright infringement complaints (thereby allowing it to argue for “safe harbor protection” with respect to infringing behavior by users). Polish publishers have generally discounted these steps. In July 2012, members of the Polish Book Chamber brought the service to court on copyright infringement charges. By early 2017, the case had been through several rounds of motions and appeals, and is currently awaiting the outcome of a publisher-filed complaint to the European Commission. A parallel lawsuit by the Polish Filmmakers Association did result in a judgment of contributory infringement against the service, leading to a requirement that Chomikuj.pl actively monitor its service for infringing materials (Dynowski and Baczykowska 2015).

From the Shadow Libraries chapter on South Africa by Eve Gray and Laura Czerniewicz:

It is clear that the conundrum of providing learning materials in South African universities extends far beyond the materials themselves and beyond supply chains, to the complex ecologies of access in general shaped by apartheid separatism and present-day policy disconnects. Student access to resources has been the victim of vacillation between a policy tradition grounded in the “alternative curriculum” principles of anti-apartheid publishing and a developmental approach, and one grounded in a neoliberal market-oriented view of the role of higher education. Despite repeated efforts to build a national education agenda around the former, persistent economic difficulty has been a more fertile climate for imposing and rationalizing the latter view, helping provoke the current protests.

One result of the neoliberal approach is the expectation that universities should be, to an extent, self-funding, with student fees as an important part of this mix. This has been a particularly unrealistic expectation in South Africa as the system expands to serve the disproportionately poor and often underprepared majority population. Expansion of the NSFAS—the national student bursary and loan scheme—has been the primary policy response, but an inadequate one given the scale of student needs.

These problems are exacerbated by the variety of market failures in the book publishing and retailing sectors, including unaffordably high prices and chronic mismatches of supply and student demand, particularly in regard to international textbooks. In this context, many students ration their limited financial resources, making judgments about which books are most important for their studies and doing without the others. They employ a combination of strategies for accessing resources that extends well beyond the commercial market, including the sharing of resources within and across cohorts, photocopying, and relying on downloading—generally with little regard to legality. Continue reading “South African Higher Education in Crisis”→

Publishers continued to bring cases against students and faculty under Article 72 and they continued to lose them. In 2007, philosophy professor Horacio Potel was sued by the Argentinean Chamber of Books (CAL) for making texts by Heidegger, Derrida, and Nietzche available on websites he had built to support his teaching—a practice he had begun in 1999. The suit was initiated at the behest of Les Éditions de Minuit, a publisher of Derrida’s work, and was promoted by the French Embassy, which invoked “the golden rule” of intellectual property (Hax 2009). (The Nietzsche component was dropped when someone pointed out that Nietzsche’s work had entered the public domain decades earlier).

The case moved forward slowly, then quickly. In Potel’s account: “I didn’t hear a word about any of this until 2009, when the police banged on my door in the middle of the night to check my address. It was a terrible situation. All the police said was: “You already know what this is about.” It was not until the next day that we were able to find out what the charges entailed. I, a philosophy professor, was charged with disseminating philosophical texts for free.” The circumstances of the case produced a significant public outcry. Under pressure, CAL decided not to pursue the case. Because this was a criminal matter, however, the withdrawal of the plaintiff did not end it. The public prosecutor decided to continue the case. Potel’s motion to dismiss was rejected, and Potel was required to post a bond of 40,000 pesos. While waiting for trial, however, the State Prosecutor reversed course and dropped the charges…

Despite the protection that judges afforded students and faculty, educational limitations and exceptions did not coalesce into a clear or consistently reproduced doctrine. None of the acquittals addressed the issue. On several occasions, judges found technicalities that allowed them to avoid sentencing students under criminal law, such as the argument that “to photocopy a photocopy is not a crime.” Although such decisions favored the students and established increasingly elaborate precedents against the use of Article 72 in such contexts, they skirted the underlying question of the role of copyright law and of university policies in enabling affordable access to educational materials. Instead, what began as more or less informal practices and forms of complicity between students and universities became more formalized and widespread. Student responsibility for organizing access to materials for their peers became a norm and ultimately a duty assumed by student associations. In some cases, the universities provide the space or other forms of subsidies to sustain this practice. The result is a de facto rather than de jure set of educational exceptions, more or less recognized and tolerated by the major institutional players.

In the immediate post-Soviet turmoil, access to print culture did not get any easier. Censorship officially ended, but so too did much of the state funding for the publishing sector. Mass unemployment, falling wages, and the resulting loss of discretionary income further undercut the shift toward market-based publishing models. The funding of libraries also dwindled, limiting new acquisitions (Elst 2005, 299–300). Economic constraints, in short, took the place of political ones. But in the absence of political repression, self-organizing efforts to address these constraints acquired greater scope of action. Slowly, the informal sphere began to deliver alternative modes of access to otherwise hard-to-get literary and scientific works.

Russian pirate libraries emerged from these enmeshed contexts: communist ideologies of the reading nation and mass education; the censorship of texts; the abused library system; economic hardships and dysfunctional markets; and, most importantly, the informal practices that ensured the survival of scholarship and literary traditions under hostile political and economic conditions. The prominent place of Russian pirate libraries in the larger informal media economy—and of Russian piracy of music, film, and other copyrighted work more generally—cannot be understood outside this history……

In the second half of the 1990s, the Russian Internet—RuNet—was awash in book digitization projects. With the advent of scanners, OCR technology, and the Internet, the work of digitization had eased considerably. Texts migrated from print to digital and sometimes back to print again. They circulated through different collections, which, in turn, merged, fell apart, and reformed. Digital libraries with the mission to collect and consolidate these free-floating texts sprung up by the dozens. Continue reading “Why the Big Shadow Libraries Are Russian”→

As automated systems became common, the number of takedown requests increased dramatically. For some online services, the numbers of complaints went from dozens or hundreds per year to hundreds of thousands or millions. In 2009, Google’s search service received less than 100 takedown requests. In 2014, it received 345 million requests. Although Google is the extreme outlier, other services—especially those in the copyright ‘hot zones’ around search, storage, and social media—saw order-of-magnitude increases. Many others—through luck, obscurity, or low exposure to copyright conflicts—remained within the “DMCA Classic” world of low-volume notice and takedown.

This split in the application of the law undermined the rough industry consensus about what services did to keep their safe harbor protection. As automated notices overwhelmed small legal teams, targeted services lost the ability to fully vet the complaints they received. Because companies exposed themselves to high statutory penalties if they ignored valid complaints, the safest path afforded by the DMCA was to remove all targeted material. Some companies did so. Some responded by developing automated triage procedures that prioritized high-risk notices for human review (most commonly, those sent by individuals).

Others began to move beyond the statutory requirements in an effort to reach agreement with rights holder groups and, in some cases, to reassert some control over the copyright disputes on their services.